


a creature of fear

by theacesofspades



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Panic Attacks, it's slight but it's def pynch, pynch is implied because we all know that's where it's headed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:54:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29279544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theacesofspades/pseuds/theacesofspades
Summary: Gansey falls down a hole in a cave and Adam realises, suddenly, that his friend is human.OR, a scene-expansion/character-study of the moment in Blue Lily, Lily Blue when Adam and Blue see Gansey panic for the first time.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III & Ronan Lynch, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 8
Kudos: 55





	a creature of fear

Ronan had taken charge the moment Gansey was out of the hole. It had surprised Adam; he’d expected Gansey to emerge and become once more the boy he knew - Gansey in charge, Gansey untouchable.

He had instead looked small and rumpled in his mud-spattered yellow, had sullenly let himself be folded neatly into Ronan’s arms and led back out the cave, Blue and Adam silent and watching and following along.

Ronan studiously ignored their attempts to catch his eye. Gansey’s head was pushed gently but insistently forward, away from their staring.

Ronan did not stop at the entrance of the cave, as Adam had expected. He kept marching Gansey along, Adam and Blue pulled forward still by the rope. Neither of them had the voice to question him. Though all of them were shaken, Adam suspected he and Blue were alone in their fear over this new development - that Gansey was, despite all appearances, perfectly, horribly human.

Once out, they had not passed Aurora. Cabeswater had shifted once again - possibly for its Greywaren and for Adam, possibly just by coincidence or some unknowable forest logic - and it had not taken as long going out as it had coming in.

The rope finally was undone just after they exited the forest. Their time in the cave had been both longer and more disorienting than he had anticipated - Adam had almost forgotten Matthew and Noah had been waiting for them, but he saw their worried faces now, pressed up against the windows of the car. Blue picked up the discarded rope, wrapping it around and around and around her arms, glancing between it and Gansey. She said nothing, but he could see she was chewing the inside of her cheek.

Adam thought Ronan was going to pile Gansey into the car, but, again, he found his expectations crushed. Ronan pushed him up against the car instead, pinning him in against it with his hands on his shoulders. Gansey let him without a word, which more than anything sent an odd sort of chill up Adam’s spine. Noah and Matthew watched from the windows - they both looked sad, but neither looked surprised.

Gansey, blocked in by Ronan’s arms, was staring at Ronan’s chest in an empty, sightless way that Adam recognized vaguely from his own mirrors. They were the same height, but Ronan seemed to tower over him now. His arms were still shaking, Adam noticed. Adrenaline coursed painfully through his own body - he squeezed his hands together to steady them, jealous of Blue and her rope keeping her fingers busy.

“Five things you can see, now.”

“Ronan. . . .” Gansey’s gaze fell down to the ground between them, the most unsure Adam had ever seen him.

“You make me do this shit all the time, come on. You know how it goes. Something you can see, go.”

Gansey mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “Adam and Blue” and “staring.” He hadn’t even glanced their way.

“Don’t be a baby about it, man, God you’re such a hypocrite.”

Properly chastised, Gansey finally started down Ronan’s impromptu list. Ronan, Blue, and Adam made top of the list, but he included also the car behind them, the grass underneath their feet, and the trees around them. Adam wasn’t sure if that counted as six or four, but Ronan let it slide in an uncharacteristically magnanimous fashion.

They kept down the list, now four things Gansey could feel. “Your hands on my shoulders.”

His voice was steadier now, only stumbling on “Mud . . . sliding down my neck, like -” before Ronan caught him with “It’s only mud.”

This was something familiar to the two of them, another thing Adam had not known.

Adam caught Blue’s eye. She made a complicated face. He shrugged with as little movement as possible.

It was childish, probably, to be so relieved that he was not the only one locked out of this intricate ritual between their oldest friends, but it was reassuring to see Blue as lost and concerned as he was.

“And . . . fuck, what’s the next one?”

“Three things you can hear.”

“Right.” Ronan raised a single imperious eyebrow that asked why he wasn’t already doing it then if he knew it so well and Gansey got immediately to listing.

But Adam had the distinct impression that Ronan had already known what was next and that this was another step of their ritual, giving Gansey back a little of his control, getting back into the pattern of Gansey-knows-things and Ronan-follows-Gansey’s-lead.

They counted steadily on down from there - two things Gansey could smell, one thing Gansey could taste - before Ronan finally released him from the side of the car. By the end of it, Gansey looked more embarrassed than afraid, though this still felt like unsteady ground to Adam. He had seen Gansey appear chastised in the past, but never so genuinely; it was always a polite way of letting someone else take charge for a moment while he subtly led from behind.

But it was real here. Gansey won nothing here by giving away control in this moment.

And he certainly was not in control. They squeezed into the Pig and Gansey took the wheel, breathing more steadily than he had the whole way out of the cave. But he did not take the opportunity to affect any façade of charm and surety. They were silent the whole way back, Noah fading out the farther they drove from Cabeswater. Even Matthew was subdued, glancing quietly between his brother and Gansey in the front seats.

It was unnerving.

~

They left Blue and Gansey at 300 Fox Way, where Calla had taken a single look at the boy and bullied him into the kitchen.

Ronan drove him to St. Agnes’ so he could exchange his muddied cave clothes for coveralls and drive himself to work. For once, the ride did not feel underlain with the electric tension that had grown commonplace between them.

It took him half the drive back to work up the gut to demand an answer from Ronan - something else new.

Ronan sighed, hands tightening on the wheel. He contemplated an answer for a long time.

“This isn’t the first time.” Adam observed.

“No.” Ronan stared straight ahead, ostensibly at the road before them.

“You already knew.”

“Mom and Declan know, too. All the time he spent at my place back then, they couldn’t not. Felt like every little thing set him off almost, ‘specially on bad days.”

Gansey had not been someone Adam thought could have ‘bad days,’ excepting perhaps days when his favorite sweater was not available to wear or his coffee came a little slow, days with nothing worse than mild inconveniences. But maybe that was being unfair.

He was beginning to suspect it was being very unfair.

“First time it happened, a bug flew by his face too fast. Wasn’t even a hornet or anything, just a little ladybug Matthew’d been chasing. He had an absolute fit over it. Mom and I thought he was seizing or something, almost called 911.” He mumbled, more to himself than to Adam, “Would’ve been the first time they had to come out to the Barns.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Declan recognized the panic attack, helped him out of it.”

That was a thing Adam took silent note of. A Declan who could recognize a panic attack and a Ronan who could not. It wasn’t something he felt he could ask Ronan about, not with his quiet frown and sadly reminiscent eye. Something to keep watch for, though.

“Did he teach you that list thing?”

“Yeah. Said people panic differently, get out of it differently. Gansey’ll start slipping into the past, reliving it, so you gotta’ ground him, keep him here. Get him focused on the things actually around him, not on what his fear is telling him is there.”

He spoke with stern authority, sounding for all the world like Gansey or Declan lecturing on the care and keeping alive of Ronan Niall Lynch. Maybe he heard it in his own voice, too; his face scrunched up and he cut himself off with a muttered “Just so you know.”

It felt odd, talking about this new complicated thing in the space usually reserved for dancing around their own complicated thing. Unless Adam was just being vain and there was no thing, complicated or otherwise, for Ronan.

As though they did not both know he would return that night to slip in and sleep on Adam’s floor, by Adam’s bed.

Or not. Maybe he would stay at Monmouth this time, stay with this strange new Gansey thing who was, he remembered, not new to Ronan at all. Strange to think of Gansey as someone who needed the care and the watching, especially from Ronan. None of it sat right. Adam wouldn’t believe it if he had not been there, had not heard Gansey’s voice, had not seen his face as he’d been pulled out of a deep, dark hole.

It was a complicated thing, this Ronan who knew and Adam who didn’t. He didn’t know where it put him. He was under no illusion that he was Gansey’s closest friend, he knew they fought too frequently for that. Still, he had thought he’d known him fairly well.

But Blue hadn’t known either. That made him feel guiltily steadier. At least he was not totally alone in the dark about all the different sides of their dear friend Gansey.

Declan had known, though.

Adam had no proper place to store this new Declan information in his working paradigm of him - it did not fit quite neatly enough into the ‘Ronan’s caretaker’ box, unless he was going to have to entirely shift around his Ronan paradigm, too - so he put it to the side for now.

He had thought himself a keen observer of the people around him - especially of those closest to him, if for no other reason than than it could be a matter of safety for him. There were certain things he knew about the people he surrounded himself with and one was that Gansey was always in control, even when he did not seem to be.

But yesterday he had not known a Gansey that could be afraid, a Gansey that surreptitiously wiped tears from his eyes as Ronan counted him down the steps to being human again. Today he had seen that Gansey was someone who knew fear as intimately as Adam did. And tomorrow felt suddenly too-large.

If his most basic understandings of Gansey were wrong, what else didn’t he know about him?

**Author's Note:**

> not entirely satisfied with this and the ending esp, but it's a lot more character study than plot so i didn't really know how to tie it off and i'm tired of it just sitting in my WIPs, oops!
> 
> i am always full of thoughts about all of these character and their relationships and how they all see each other and how complicated and messy it always is, feel free to scream about them with me
> 
> (and in case anyone needs/wants it: therapistaid.com/worksheets/grounding-techniques.pdf)


End file.
